Today I want to talk about caching. Is it important, when to use and when not to use it.
Usually when a site is slow, the first piece of advice you get is “Use a caching plugin, …, dummy”.
Well that could be the biggest mistake you made. You have to understand what caching does. It tries to create some “shortcuts” when people are accessing your site. Especially when you use WordPress and have dynamic pages, it creates a copy of the page and tries to prevent the multiple operations (access to the database, other files, …) involved in loading a page. You may think that sound great to me. Well maybe.
But if you have a membership site, you don’t want that, because each user is supposed to have a different page. For example to say “Hey John Welcome back to the site”. Or if you have multiple levels in your membership, you don’t want everybody to have the same page and especially all the free people to have access to your paid content. Because that’s what caching is going to do for you.
If you don’t have a membership site, or if you have a site where everybody has the same content, then caching is OK.
I am not a big fan of caching, especially using a WordPress plugin for caching. I feel it’s like this medicine that has a 3-page long disclaimer and I ask myself, “Do I really want to have any of those troubles?”. “Is it really worth it?” “Do I want to use this head hack in 3 secondes, but maybe loose all my teeth in the process?”
You should ask yourself, why do you want to use caching? Is there any other possibilities ( Of course there are, there is never only one solution). What is on your site? Just text? Images? Videos? … .
You need to plan, and understand what is going on. Caching is not this magic pill or magic button. People usually want to use caching because their site is slow. I would investigate why your site is slow instead of trying to covering it up using caching.
I’ll say be careful what you wish for.
That’s it for now.
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